Noel Harding

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition by Toronto/Amsterdam-based artist Noel Harding. Harding has been exhibiting since 1972 and in recent years has gained an international reputation for his sculptural installations and for public art commissions. In 1988, he had a retrospective at the Art Gallery of Ontario, and in 1993 a major exhibition of recent work was mounted at the Palace of Exhibitions in Budapest. His public art commissions include the Mississauga City Hall in 1990, and a rooftop sculpture for the City of Amsterdam in 1991.

The three multi-component sculptures to be exhibited at the Contemporary Art Gallery were included in the Budapest exhibition and will then be travelling to Moscow after the Vancouver showing. Harding uses industrial materials such as corrugated cardboard, aluminum beading, and glass bottles. One of the sculptures is three metres high and consists of two suit jackets made of cardboard that are mounted on a metal armature. These giant jackets are expressively formed and, as presented by Harding, convey a sense of humour with his debunking of heroics of monumental sculpture and the authority of the suit.


A closeup of a small sculpture on a concrete floor. The work is a cardboard box on a small wood ramp. The corner of the box is open, a screwdriver with a clear handle shaped like a lightbulb inside.

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Two large sculptures in a gallery. The works are made of metal pyramidal frame bases, with huge blazers made of cardboard at the top. The blazers face each other and one is leaning forward slightly. 

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The corner of a gallery with white floors and walls. There are 3 grey panels on the walls. On 1 panel there is a flat, wrench-shaped cardboard piece. This shape is repeated in 3D, leaning on the wall. 

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A wrench-shaped cardboard sculpture on the floor of a gallery. The work is made of 2 flat sides resting on the floor like a tent.  In the "jaws" there is a glowing lightbulb, hanging from the ceiling. 

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A lightbulb hangs low from the ceiling of a dark gallery space. 4 small sculptures are aglow. They are cardboard boxes, on small wood ramps, with large screwdrivers stuck in their opened corners.

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The corner of a gallery with 3 grey panels on the walls. Across 2 panels there is a flat, wrench-shaped cardboard piece. This shape is repeated in 3D, leaning on the wall with a light in its "jaw." 

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Rebecca Belmore

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present a new exhibition by Ontario-based Ojibwa artist Rebecca Belmore. Belmore's work encompasses both performance and installation pieces that employ various mediums and focus on giving voice to the Aboriginal community.

The exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery is titled WANA-NA-WANG- ONG, the Anishinaabe word for sandy bay, and is comprised of two 8 feet by 14 feet suspended panels made from spruce roots, dried mud, and vines. The materials were gathered and the pieces constructed at Sioux Lookout in northern Ontario where Belmore's parents and grandparents once lived. *WANA-NA-WANG-ONG* is a tactile and contemplative work that literally brings the northern Ontario landscape to the west coast. Cedar tea will be served throughout the exhibition.

Rebecca Belmore has performed and exhibited extensively in Canada, most recently in the 1992 National Gallery of Canada exhibition *LAND/SPIRIT/POWER*. *WANA-NA-WANG-ONG* will be Belmore's first exhibition in Vancouver.

Essay: “This Is Not About Landscape, It's About Land.,” Lee-Ann Martin

Poetry: Florene Belmore

A closeup of a dense bed of moss, with several small pieces of coiled and rusty wire poking through. The moss is pale yellow-green and the wire is different shades of orange-brown.

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A gallery with several artworks on the walls and floor, including 3 life-scale photos. A colour photo shows a person standing on a rocky shore, dressed warmly. The other 2 show the rest of the shore.

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A closeup of 3 artworks on a white wall. They are made of thin glossy material, stretched out and pinned. 2 of the works include enlarged text from hand-written documents about the queen of England.

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A closeup of the base of a wall in a gallery. The wall is painted clay-red, and has a flat handmade dish resting on the floor in front of it. The dish contains a mound of powder that matches the wall.

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A large installation in a gallery. The work is a large plane of coils of rusty wire on one side, and green moss on the other. The work is curved and pieces of each material poke out on either side.

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A large installation in a gallery. The work is a two large plane of coils of rusty wire on one side, and green moss on the other curved into an incomplete cylinder, suspended above the ground.

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WANA-NA-WANG-ONG

Mary Kelly

Mary Kelly explores the construction of gender and sexuality in her work. Two earlier projects, *Post-partum Document* and *Interim*, are large-scale bodies of work, each developed over a period of years which address maternal femininity and the arrival into "middle-age" respectively. These works are dominated by subjective texts that convey psychic and social structures of femininity within the framework of psychoanalysis.

With *Gloria Patri*, Kelly continues to explore ideas around gender, this time delving into the masculine ideal relative to heroism and war. The three registers in this installation—the discs, trophies and shields—represent visually the iconic display of war and victory. The hybrid insignia on the discs, montaged from the logos of U.S. military organizations, are parodic representations of the military spectacle. The short aggressive statements inscribed on the trophies are culled from newscast comments by American soldiers during the Gulf War. The stories on the shields, written by the artist, are about everyday situations of mastery set up to be undone. Together, these elements create what Kelly refers to as the "narrativization of space" and instill a thinking about the vulnerability of the masculine ideal as projected by the military machine.

Mary Kelly has had considerable influence on feminist art practices in both Europe and North America. Recent exhibitions have taken place at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; the Vancouver Art Gallery; Postmasters Gallery, New York; the Institute for Contemporary Art, London, England; and the Royal Academy, London, England. Mary Kelly currently teaches in the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York. 

*Gloria Patri* originated at Herbert F. Johnson Museum at Cornell University, and subsequently showed at Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery at Wesleyan University, Postmasters Gallery in New York, and the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, England.

Several artworks on a white wall. At the top, there's a row of 4 metal circles with black crests. Below, there are 2 small trophy shapes . At the bottom center there is a shield shape with small text.

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The corner of a gallery space with several metal artworks mounted on the walls. At the top there is a row of circular crests and below there are shield and trophy-like shapes. 

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The corner of a gallery space with metal artworks resembling family crests and shields. The works are all silver with black details and the light in the room reflects dramatically from their surface.

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A closeup of an artwork on a white wall. It is a glossy silver shield with a black outline and small black text. The first sentence reads: "Ignoring the trail, he'd followed a tributary to the river."

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Gloria Patri

Wing Chow

“Viewers can catch a crash course in Vancouver art of the 70s just from the pieces on the CAG walls. Works such as Wing Chow's four images of rough concrete or earthen surface illustrate the 70s’ obsession with surface and texture: after all, this was the decade that popularized corduroy, velour, interior stucco, and shag carpets. Another obsession emerges in an entitled geometric drawing by Gary Lee-Nova: maniacally intricate and detailed pencil work. Scrapped with a painstaking zeal rarely seen today. The influence of album art and acid can be seen in two works by Jed Irwin, whose biomorphic shapes appear to borrow from Martin Sharp’s cover for Cream’s Wheels of Fire, and pop still makes its mark in Eastcoffe’s bright silkscreens of industrial valves and faucets. … This exhibit smacks so viscerally of a place and time that now seems ancient history that it is both provocative and pleasurable.”

Excerpted from Alexander Varty, “Civic Stores Contain Tack and Treasure,” *The Georgia Straight* (Vancouver, BC), July 30 – August 6, 1993.


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Art Acquired by the City of Vancouver through the Local Initiatives Program

Sorting Through the Seventies 

Nan Goldin

*The Ballad of Sexual Dependency* is an exhibition of colour photographs by New York-based artist Nan Goldin.

*The Ballad* is an intensely personal visual diary of Goldin's life and that of her extended family in Boston, Provincetown, London, Berlin, Mexico, and New York. Sexuality and sexual politics are the themes which link this body of photographs taken over a span of fifteen years. In her work, Goldin explores the chasm which exists in women's and men's idea of the nature of relationships. She states, "men and women are irrevocably strangers to each other, irreconcilably unsuited, almost as if they were from different planets .... I'm trying to figure out what makes coupling so difficult." The sense of cinema verite in *The Ballad* stems from a direct relationship with her subjects more than an objective observation of them. 

"The instant of photographing, instead of creating a distance, is a moment of clarity and emotional connection for me. There is a popular notion that the photographer is by nature a voyeur, the last one invited to the party. But I'm not crashing; this is my party. This is my family, my history." 

This exhibition of seemingly spontaneous photographs is a detailed and oftentimes visceral documentary not only of Goldin's life but also of a disillusioned and disenfranchised generation of the 70s and 80s.

### Biography 
Nan Goldin was born in Washington, D.C. in 1953 and grew up in Boston, Mass. The Ballad has been included in the Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial in 1985 and the Berlin Film Festival in 1986. More recently, her work was exhibited in the 1993 Whitney Biennial and at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

A closeup of 2 framed photo works, mounted on a white wall. In one photo, a person lays on a couch that matches their dress. In the other there is a semi-nude person, sitting and wearing a cow mask. 

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The corner of a gallery space with a hallway visible in the background. On each wall, there are photographic works in black frames. The photos show people dancing or sitting in dark rooms. 

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The corner of a gallery space. Mounted on the white walls are photo works in black frames . The photos are of people in dark rooms. Some are embracing, some are dressed, and some are half-dressed.

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Three framed photo works on a white wall. All photos are of different couples. From left to right, the couples go from dressed to nude they appear to be dancing, having sex, and resting together.

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A closeup of three photos in black frames on a white wall. The photos all show people laying down in different stages of nudity. One person is pregnant, one is in bed, and one is sunbathing in shorts.

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The Ballad of Sexual Dependency

Roy Arden

The Contemporary Art Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new colour photographs by Vancouver based artist Roy Arden. Arden has been exhibiting for a decade and in the mid-1980s gained an international reputation for his photographic works incorporating retrieved or "appropriated'' archival photographs that encouraged the viewer to reconsider how history is constructed through photography. Arden's work is in the collections of the Vancouver Art Gallery; Winnipeg Art Gallery; Art Gallery of Ontario; Fond Nationale d' Art Contemporain, Paris; Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart; and the Foundation de la Photographie, Zurich.

The exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery is Arden's first solo exhibition in Vancouver since 1990. It also marks his return to taking his own photographs. In a departure from traditions of picturesque landscape photography, Arden depicts seemingly anonymous aspects of landscape undergoing transformation such as residential and commercial development sites and waste dumps, and constructs a matrix of images that provoke a reading directed to the social and economic change that continues to affect British Columbia.

Essay: "An Artist and his Models," Jeff Wall

5 vertical, framed photographic works on a white wall. The three frames in the centre contain 2 photos each, all of construction sites. The two on the ends each have one small photo of a landscape. 

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A closeup of 2 framed photographic works on a white wall. On the left, a horizontal photo shows stacks of plywood and cell towers. The vertical one on the right, shows what looks like a museum lobby.

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A gallery space with two walls framing a hallway in the background. The walls on the left and the right have a large framed photo work on them. In the centre, the hallway has three framed photo works.

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A gallery space with 6 framed photographic works mounted on the white walls. The works are both vertical and horizontal and depict city scenes, such as construction sites, houses, and underpasses.

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The walls of a gallery space and a hallway. On all walls, there are framed photo works. The frames in the hallway contain 2 photos, and the frames in the interior walls have 1 larger photo in them. 

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A closeup of two framed photo works on a white wall. On the left, there is a  birds-eye view of a city with waterways. On the left, there is a photo of a mining truck and an excavator, digging dirt.

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Lucia Onzain

Miguel Mont

Miguel Angel Beneyto

Curro Ulzurrun

*After Virtue* is an exhibition that brings together the work of four young visual artists from the Catalan region of Spain. Featured in this exhibition is a selection of drawing, painting, sculpture, and site-specific installation employing materials such as lead, tar, glass, pigment, wood, metal, and stone. Each work demonstrates an exploration of the properties of the materials themselves.

*After Virtue* was curated by Jeffrey Swartz, a Canadian who resides in Barcelona. Through this exhibition he comments on certain persistent currents of contemporary art practice not only in Catalonia but in most of Spain. These currents look to the vitalism of Arte Povera and the concrete, objectual and sensual character of Catalan conceptualism. A catalogue accompanies this exhibition with essays by Jeffrey Swartz and Carles Poy from Barcelona.

*After Virtue* is the second half of a cultural exchange between Cold City Gallery in Toronto and Galeria Carles Poy in Barcelona. This exchange was made possible through the generous support of the Generalitat de Catalunya, the Ministry of Culture and Communications - Arts Abroad, and the City of Toronto through the Ontario Arts Council.

Curated by Jeffery Swartz
Exhibition organized by Cold City Gallery, Toronto and Galeria Carles Poy, Barcelona


A wooden shelf-like sculpture hangs horizontally on a wall. A drawing of two figures embracing made on blank musical notation paper is pinned to the wall beneath it. 

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An artwork mounted on a white wall. The work is a piece of glass in a square diamond shape with a grey-brown rectangle and a red cylinder mounted on top. A photo of two crossed arms is pasted onto it. 

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2 artworks in a gallery. One is a black rectangular prism with a black cylinder embedded in it, mounted horizontally on the wall. The other is a black rectangular prism placed vertically on the floor. 

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2 artworks on small grey plinths mounted on white walls. On the left is a black vessel with white on its "handle" and white filling inside. The other is a carved piece of wood with a concave interior.

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A gallery space with many artworks. Two of the works are on plinths on the wall, and 2 others are directly mounted. In the corner of the image, there is a work that is a large white rectangular prism.

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A gallery space with a hallway in the background. Art is on all the visible walls. Two works are on mounted plinths, 2 works are paintings, and one is a long wooden piece with a photo underneath.

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Three small circular artworks hang on a wall to the left, next two them is a tall black plinth and in the background part of another sculptural work is visible through a doorway. 

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Miguel Angel Beneyto, Miguel Mont, Lucia Onzain, Curro Ulzurrun

After Virtue

Paul Wong

*Chinaman's Peak* is the name of a mountain in the Canadian Rockies; *Walking The Mountain* (*Hanng San* in Cantonese) refers to the beliefs and rituals associated with ancestral worship that continue to be an important part of contemporary Chinese culture. They provide continuity between the past, the present and the future; between the living and the spirit world.

This installation by Vancouver artist Paul Wong honours specifically the spirits of the Chinese pioneers, the railway workers in the late 1800s, the miners at the turn of the century, the sojourner Hoy Ming Wong (1896–1968), and the suicides of Kenneth Fletcher (1954–1978) and Paul Speed (1967–1991). It unites seemingly isolated people through the communal act of remembering.

The 26-minute video around which the installation is built evolved from a performance commissioned and exhibited by the Walter Phillips Gallery in 1992, and produced with the assistance of the Television and Video Program at the Banff Centre for the Arts. 

Co-curated by Keith Wallace and Sylvie Gilbert


A still from Paul Wong's "Chinaman's Peak, Walking the Mountain".